Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party. She was cruelly wounded by her sister's attack on her, but she could never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia's sense of humor was so tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of snobbishness and social ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried out: "Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you'd be too thankful to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!" Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that morning's paper, open at _Society Notes_. Loyal Flora Burgess had lavished on "Miss Lydia's" first dinner party her entire vocabulary of deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The "function had inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in Endbury," was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of the music-makers afterward. Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. "Flora Burgess is too killing!" she cried. "She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any attention to her--Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before the people even began to come. I can't even remember much about it except that every single thing was wrong. That about 'cosmopolitan amplitude--' Oh, isn't Flora too funny!--means having music after dinner, I suppose. I don't know what else." "Of course," said Marietta, rising to go, "it doesn't make any difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know that. The report in the paper--" "Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say--that it's all pretense, every bit--and not--" Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: "I don't know how you feel about it, but _I_ shouldn't be very easy in my mind to have my only sister's name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social function."